SHOWCASE is a site-specific environment realized in the display windows of three adjacent shop units in the underpass at Móricz Zsigmond Square. It creates a coherent frame of reference that can be grasped by the visitor’s gaze, yet whose interpretive scope opens out toward infinity, expanding the everyday consciousness of hurried passers-by and idle onlookers from the narrow, low-ceilinged spaces of the underground corridors into the vastness of the imagination.

The art of Tamás Komoróczky (*1963) is defined by a conceptual approach; his objects and assemblages can be read as “conceptual friezes,” in which ideas follow one another in garland-like sequences. Departing from the cornerstone of a single idea, we may pass through the hall-church of aleatoric composition, wander the garden of conceptual intersections and branching paths, set foot on the trails of rewriting and re-inscribing artworks from the canon of fine art, mass culture, and individual oeuvres alike, or plunge into the labyrinths of montage and bricolage techniques—only to arrive, within the environment itself as a “total artwork that surrounds us,” at a sense of wonder before the architecture of thought. This architecture is bordered by the ornaments of those imaginative arts so dear to Komoróczky (poetry, prose, dance, music).

The spatial installation of SHOWCASE, composed across three adjacent display windows, is structured musically and could be likened, in terms of genre, to a “song cycle”—that is, a larger composition in which several different voices or independent songs are interwoven. Komoróczky borrowed the exhibition’s subtitle from Ten Notes on a Summer’s Day, a 1986 track by the anarcho-punk band Crass, known for its three A’s (antifascist, anticapitalist, anti-authoritarian). He listened to the piece repeatedly over the course of last summer while working in his studio on the exhibition material and on turning the received prints into “book covers.”

Komoróczky’s exhibition is, above all, a critical confrontation—a form of intervention that drives us through the “icy desert of abstractions” in order that the mirrored surfaces of this plane of immanence may compel us to reflect critically on humanity’s intellectual and techno-scientific hubris, and on its effects on society and nature.

Ármin Tillmann